2009 review: It's the environment, stupid

How to survive the coming century Alligators basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to a world warmed by 4 °C.

1709: The year that Europe froze One winter in the early 18th century, it was so cold animals died in their barns, travellers froze to death, and even the Mediterranean iced over. It was Europe's coldest spell for the past 500 years.

One last chance to save mankind James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory, thinks climate change will wipe out most of us this century – but there may be one way to save ourselves.

Sea level rise: It's worse than we thought In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast a sea-level rise of between 19 and 59 centimetres by 2100. Even before it was released, the report was outdated, and the bad news is that there is a growing consensus that its estimates were wildly optimistic. So just how high will the ocean go?

In sickness and in health It was a year as hopeful as it was scary, with a flu pandemic, genome hackers and fresh hopes for Alzheimer's disease and HIV

In green tech we must trust More brainpower than ever before has been expended on technologies to cut the damage we do to the environment – here are some of the most interesting

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This strange bug-eyed salamander is was discovered in the Cordillera del Condor (Image: Jessica Deichmann)